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Future

Intro

Upgrading the world

When we think about the future we generally think about a world in which people who are identical to us in every important way enjoy better technology: laser guns, intelligent robots, and spaceships that travel at the speed of light. Yet the revolutionary potential of future technologies is to change Homo sapiens itself, including our bodies and our minds, and not merely our vehicles and weapons. The most amazing thing about the future won’t be the spaceships, but the beings flying them.

Humans are going to upgrade themselves into gods. That is, humans will acquire abilities that in the past were considered divine, such as eternal youth, mind reading, and the ability to engineer life.

Physicists define the Big Bang as a singularity. It is a point at which all the known laws of nature did not function. Time too did not exist. It is thus meaningless to say that anything existed “before” the Big Bang. We may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world— me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant. Anything happening beyond that point is meaningless to us.

Lectures

Articles

From Natural Selection to Intelligent Design

For close to four billion years, the evolution of life on earth has been governed by natural selection. There have been many fascinating twists and turns in the game of life, but its basic rules remained unchanged. Exactly the same principles of natural selection have shaped the evolution of bacteria in the primordial oceans, the evolution of dinosaurs in the Jurassic period, the evolution of archaic humans in the Stone Age, and the evolution of Galapagos finches in recent centuries.

Not all people accept this idea. Religious fundamentalists insist that intelligent design rather than natural selection has shaped life on earth. They argue that the intelligent designs of a great god sculpted the long necks of giraffes, the colorful tails of peacocks, and the jumbo brains of humans. To the best of our scientific understanding, these religious zealots are completely mistaken. The past history of life owes nothing to divine intelligence. Ironically, however, the zealots may well be right about the future. Very soon, the four-billion-year-old regime of natural selection may be overthrown, and life in the universe will increasingly be shaped by the intelligent designs of divine beings. For in the medium future, we humans are likely to turn ourselves into godlike beings, possessing divine abilities of creation by design. This will be not only the greatest revolution in thousands of years of history, but also the greatest revolution in billions of years of biology.

The replacement of natural selection by intelligent design could happen in any of three ways. The first way is through biological engineering. Bio-designers could re-engineer the shapes, abilities and desires of organisms, in order to realize some preconceived cultural idea. There is nothing new about biological engineering, per se. People have been using selective breeding, castration and other forms of bio-engineering for at least 10,000 years. But recent advances in our understanding of how organisms work, down to the cellular and genetic levels, have opened up previously unimaginable possibilities. For example, scientists can today take a gene from a jellyfish that glows in a green florescent light, and implant it in a rabbit or a monkey, which starts glowing in a green florescent light. E. coli bacteria have been genetically engineered to produce human insulin and bio-fuel. A gene extracted from an arctic fish has been inserted into potatoes, making the plants more frost resistant.

On a grander scale, geneticists have already managed to engineer genius mice that display improved memory and learning skills, and super-worms that live up to six times their normal lifespan. There is no technical reason why we could not start engineering superhumans too. Within a century or even a few decades, genetic engineering and other forms of biological engineering might enable us to make far-reaching alterations not only to our physiology, immune system, and life expectancy, but also to our intellectual and emotional capacities.

The second way that intelligent design might replace natural selection is even more radical. Instead of limiting themselves to working with organic structures, future designers might well use inorganic parts as well, and engineer cyborgs. Cyborgs are living beings combining organic with inorganic parts, such as a human with bionic hands. In a sense, nearly all of us are bionic these days, since our natural senses and cognitive skills are supplemented by devices such as eyeglasses, pacemakers, and computers. However, in the medium future this process is likely to go much further. We may start having more and more inorganic devices connected directly to our bodies. Devices that will be inseparable from us and that will change our abilities, desires, personalities, and identities in a fundamental way.

There are already working prototypes of bionic ears, eyes and limbs, which can be connected directly to the brain. These devices are currently used to overcome disabilities, but they might soon begin to be used to upgrade abilities. Below is a photograph of Jesse Sullivan holding hands with Claudia Mitchell. Jesse and Mitchell lost their arms in accidents, and are now using bionic arms, which are operated by thought alone. Neural signals arriving from the brain are translated by micro-computers into electrical commands, and the arms move accordingly. When Jesse and Claudia want to raise their arms, they do what any normal person unconsciously does—and the arms rise.

At present these bionic arms are a poor replacement for our organic originals, but they have the potential for unlimited development. Bionic arms, for example, could be made far more powerful than the organic arms even of the world’s boxing champion. Bionic arms could be replaced every few years, or upgraded when a new model is developed. They could also be detached from the body and operated at a distance. And they could be multiplied at will. You could have six of them, like some Hindu goddess, instead of the miserly two of mere mortals.

Meanwhile, nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells, and even reverse aging processes. Even more revolutionary projects aim to create direct two-way brain-computer interfaces that will allow computers to read the electrical signals of a human brain, simultaneously transmitting signals that the brain can read. Such interfaces can link a brain directly to the internet, or to directly link several brains to each other, thereby creating a sort of inter-brain-net. Nobody knows what might be the impact on human consciousness and human identity.

Finally, intelligent design might dispense with organic components altogether, and engineer completely non-organicbeings. The Human Brain Project, launched in 2005, hopes to recreate a complete human brain inside a computer, with electronic circuits in the computer emulating neural networks in the brain. The project’s director has claimed that, if funded properly, within a decade or two we could have an artificial human brain inside a computer that could feel, talk and behave very much as a human does. If successful, that would mean that after four billion years of milling around inside the small world of organic compounds, life will suddenly break out into the vastness of the inorganic realm, ready to take up shapes beyond our wildest dreams.

Not all scholars agree that the brain works in a manner analogous to today’s digital computers, so it is not at all clear if you could ever create a living brain inside a computer. However, in April 2013 the European Union selected the Human Brain Project to be its scientific flagship, giving it a grant of more than €1 billion. The Europeans, it seems, must be taking this possibility very seriously.

True, the administrators of the European Union not always succeed in forecasting the future accurately. And it would indeed be surprising if all the above forecasts are realized in full. History teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialize due to unforeseen barriers, and that other unimagined scenarios will in fact come to pass. After Hiroshima and Sputnik, many began to speculate that by the year 2000, nuclear-powered space colonies will pepper the Moon, Mars and even Pluto. It didn’t happen. On the other hand, nobody foresaw the Internet, which is much more amazing then flying to Mars.

So it is best to regard the above forecasts not as prophecies, but as stimulants for our imagination. We cannot be certain how soon and in what ways the regime of natural selection will be overthrown, but we must start thinking very seriously how to run a world governed by intelligent design. Humans are likely to upgrade themselves into gods, able to shape and reshape their bodies, their minds, and the bodies and minds of other life forms. Hence the most important question facing humankind today is “What do we want to become?”. And since we might soon be able to design our desires too, the real question facing us is: “What do we want to want?” Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven’t given it enough thought.

The War Against Death

Of all mankind’s ostensibly insoluble problems, one has remained the most vexing, interesting, and important: the problem of death itself. Before the late modern era, most religions and ideologies took it for granted that death was our inevitable fate. Moreover, most faiths turned death into the main source of meaning in life. Try to imagine Islam, Christianity, or the ancient Egyptian religion in a world without death. These creeds taught people that they must come to terms with death and pin their hopes on the afterlife, rather than seek to overcome death and live forever here on earth. The best minds were busy giving meaning to death, not trying to escape it.

That is the theme of the most ancient myth to come down to us—the Gilgamesh myth of ancient Sumer. Its hero is the strongest and most capable man in the world, King Gilgamesh of Uruk, who could defeat anyone in battle. One day, Gilgamesh’s best friend, Enkidu, died. Gilgamesh sat by the body and observed it for many days, until he saw a worm dropping out of his friend’s nostril. At that moment Gilgamesh was gripped by a terrible horror, and he resolved that he himself would never die. He would somehow find a way to defeat death. Gilgamesh then undertook a journey to the end of the universe, killing lions, battling scorpion-men, and finding his way into the underworld. There he shattered the stone giants of Urshanabi and the ferryman of the river of the dead, and found Utnapishtim, the last survivor of the primordial flood. Yet Gilgamesh failed in his quest. He returned home empty-handed, as mortal as ever, but with one new piece of wisdom. When the gods created man, Gilgamesh had learned, they set death as man’s inevitable destiny, and man must learn to live with it.

Disciples of progress do not share this defeatist attitude. For men of science, death is not an inevitable destiny, but merely a technical problem. People die not because the gods decreed it, but due to various technical failures—a heart attack, cancer, an infection. And every technical problem has a technical solution. If the heart flutters, it can be stimulated by a pacemaker or replaced by a new heart. If cancer rampages, it can be killed with drugs or radiation. If bacteria proliferate, they can be subdued with antibiotics. True, at present we cannot solve all technical problems. But we are working on them. Our best minds are not wasting their time trying to give meaning to death. Instead, they are busy investigating the physiological, hormonal, and genetic systems responsible for disease and old age. They are developing new medicines, revolutionary treatments, and artificial organs that will lengthen our lives and might one day vanquish the Grim Reaper himself.

Until recently, you would not have heard scientists, or anyone else, speak so bluntly. “Defeat death?! What nonsense! We are only trying to cure cancer, tuberculosis, and Alzheimer’s disease,” they insisted. People avoided the issue of death because the goal seemed too elusive. Why create unreasonable expectations? We’re now at a point, however, where we can be frank about it. The leading project of the Scientific Revolution is to give humankind eternal life. Even if killing death seems a distant goal, we have already achieved things that were inconceivable a few centuries ago. In 1199, King Richard the Lionheart was struck by an arrow in his left shoulder. Today we’d say he incurred a minor injury. But in 1199, in the absence of antibiotics and effective sterilization methods, this minor flesh wound turned infected and gangrene set in. The only way to stop the spread of gangrene in twelfth century Europe was to cut off the infected limb, impossible when the infection was in a shoulder. The gangrene spread through the Lionheart’s body and no-one could help the king. He died in great agony two weeks later.

As recently as the nineteenth century, the best doctors still did not know how to prevent infection and stop the putrefaction of tissues. In field hospitals doctors routinely cut off the hands and legs of soldiers who received even minor limb injuries, fearing gangrene. These amputations, as well as all other medical procedures (such as tooth extraction), were done without any anesthetics. The first anesthetics—ether, chloroform, and morphine—entered regular usage in Western medicine only in the middle of the nineteenth century. Before the advent of chloroform, four soldiers had to hold down a wounded comrade while the doctor sawed off the injured limb. On the morning after the battle of Waterloo (1815), heaps of sawn-off hands and legs could be seen adjacent to the field hospitals. In those days, carpenters and butchers who enlisted to the army were often sent to serve in the medical corps, because surgery required little more than knowing your way with knives and saws.

In the two centuries since Waterloo, things have changed beyond recognition. Pills, injections, and sophisticated operations save us from a spate of illnesses and injuries that once dealt an inescapable death sentence. They also protect us against countless daily aches and ailments, which pre-modern people simply accepted as part of life. The average life expectancy jumped from around 25–40 years to around 67 in the entire world, and to around 80 years in the developed world.

How long will the Gilgamesh Project—the quest for immortality—take to complete? A hundred years? Five hundred years? A thousand years? When we recall how little we knew about the human body in 1900, and how much knowledge we have gained in a single century, there is cause for optimism. Genetic engineers have recently doubled the average life expectancy of Caenorhabditis elegans worms. Could they do the same for Homo sapiens? Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells, and even reverse aging processes. A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely).

Whether or not Project Gilgamesh succeeds, from a historical perspective it is fascinating to see that most late-modern religions and ideologies have already taken death and the afterlife out of the equation. Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life. Beginning in the eighteenth century, religions and ideologies such as liberalism, socialism, and feminism lost all interest in the afterlife. What, exactly, happens to a communist after he or she dies? What happens to a capitalist? What happens to a feminist? It is pointless to look for the answer in the writings of Marx, Adam Smith, or Simone de Beauvoir. The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will forever live in its collective memory. Yet this promise is so fuzzy that even most nationalists do not really know what to make of it.

Upgrading Inequality

The Last War

We are living in the most peaceful era in history. International wars have dropped to an all-time low. With few exceptions, since 1945 states no longer invade other states in order to conquer and swallow them up. Such conquests had been the bread and butter of political history since time immemorial. It was how most great empires were established, and how most rulers and populations expected things to stay. But campaigns of conquest like those of the Romans, Mongols and Ottomans cannot take place today anywhere in the world. Since 1945, no independent country recognized by the UN has been conquered and wiped off the map. Limited international wars still occur from time to time, and millions still die in wars, but wars are no longer the norm.

Many people believe that the disappearance of international war is unique to the rich democracies of Western Europe. In fact, peace reached Europe after it prevailed in other parts of the world. Thus the last serious international wars between South American countries were the Peru-Ecuador War of 1941 and the Bolivia-Paraguay War of 1932-1935. And before that there hadn’t been a serious war between South American countries since 1879–1884, with Chile on one side and Bolivia and Peru on the other.

We seldom think of the Arab world as particularly peaceful. Yet only once since the Arab countries won their independence has one of them mounted a full-scale invasion of another (the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990). There have been quite a few border clashes (e.g., Syria vs. Jordan in 1970), many armed interventions of one in the affairs of another (e.g., Syria in Lebanon), numerous civil wars (Algeria, Yemen, Libya), and an abundance of coups and revolts. Yet there have been no full-scale international wars among the Arab states except the Gulf War. Even widening the scope to include the entire Muslim world adds only one more example, the Iran-Iraq War. There was no Turkey-Iran War, Pakistan-Afghanistan War, or Indonesia-Malaysia War.

In Africa things are far less rosy. But even there, most conflicts are civil wars and coups. Since African states won their independence in the 1960s and 1970s, very few countries have invaded one another in the hope of conquest.

There have been periods of relative calm before, as for example in Europe between 1871 and 1914, and they always ended badly. But this time it is different. For real peace is not the mere absence of war. Real peace is the implausibility of war. There has never been real peace in the world. Between 1871 and 1914, a European war remained a plausible eventuality, and the expectation of war dominated the thinking of armies, politicians, and ordinary citizens alike. This foreboding was true for all other peaceful periods in history. An iron law of international politics decreed, “For every two nearby polities, there is a plausible scenario that will cause them to go to war against one another within one year.” This law of the jungle was in force in late nineteenth-century Europe, in medieval Europe, in ancient China, and in classical Greece. If Sparta and Athens were at peace in 450 BC, there was a plausible scenario that they would be at war by 449 BC.

Today humankind has broken the law of the jungle. There is at last real peace, and not just absence of war. For most polities, there is no plausible scenario leading to full-scale conflict within one year. What could lead to war between Germany and France next year? Or between China and Japan? Or between Brazil and Argentina? Some minor border clash might occur, but only a truly apocalyptic scenario could result in an old-fashioned full-scale war between the latter in 2014, with Argentine armored divisions sweeping to the gates of Rio, and Brazilian carpet-bombers pulverizing the neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. Such wars might still erupt next year between several pairs of states, e.g., between Israel and Syria, Ethiopia and Eritrea, or the USA and Iran, but these are only the exceptions that prove the rule.

This situation might of course change in the future, and with hindsight, the world of today might seem incredibly naïve. Yet from a historical perspective, our very naivety is fascinating. Never before has peace been so prevalent that people could not even imagine war.

Scholars have sought to explain this happy development in more books and articles than you would ever want to read yourself, and they have identified several contributing factors. Two among them are particularly important. First, the price of war has gone up dramatically. The Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow architects of the atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to seek world domination by force of arms.

Secondly, while the price of war soared, its profits declined. For most of history, polities could enrich themselves by looting or annexing enemy territories. Most wealth consisted of fields, cattle, slaves, and gold, so it was easy to loot it or occupy it. Today, wealth consists mainly of human capital, technical know-how, and complex socioeconomic structures such as banks. Consequently it is difficult to carry it off or incorporate it into one’s territory.

Consider California. Its wealth was initially built on gold mines. But today it is built on silicon and celluloid—Silicon Valley and the celluloid hills of Hollywood. What would happen if the Chinese were to mount an armed invasion of California, land a million soldiers on the beaches of San Francisco, and storm inland? They would gain little. There are no silicon mines in Silicon Valley. The wealth resides in the minds of Google engineers and Hollywood script doctors, directors, and special-effects wizards, who would be on the first plane to Bangalore or Mumbai long before the Chinese tanks rolled into Sunset Boulevard. It is not coincidental that the few full-scale international wars that still take place in the world, such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, occur in places were wealth is old-fashioned material wealth. The Kuwaiti sheikhs could flee abroad, but the oil fields stayed put and were occupied.

Humans have passed their expiry date

Presently, only a tiny fraction of these new opportunities have been realized. Yet the world of 2013 is already a world in which culture is releasing itself from the shackles of biology. Our ability to engineer not merely the world around us, but above all the world inside our bodies and minds, is developing at breakneck speed. More and more spheres of activity are being shaken out of their complacent ways. Lawyers need to rethink issues of privacy and identity; governments are faced with rethinking matters of healthcare and equality; sports associations and educational institutions need to redefine fair play and achievement; pension funds and labor markets should readjust to a world in which 60 might be the new 30. They must all deal with the conundrums of bio-engineering, cyborgs, and inorganic life.

Mapping the first human genome required 15 years and $3 billion. Today you can map a person’s DNA within a few weeks and at the cost of a few hundred dollars. The era of personalized medicine —medicine that matches treatment to DNA – has begun. The family doctor could soon tell you with greater certainty that you face high risks of liver cancer, whereas you needn’t worry too much about heart attacks. She could determine that a popular medication that helps 92 percent of people is useless to you, and you should instead take another pill, fatal to many people but just right for you. The road to near-perfect medicine stands before us.

However, with improvements in medical knowledge will come new ethical conundrums. Ethicists and legal experts are already wrestling with the thorny issue of privacy as it relates to DNA. Would insurance companies be entitled to ask for our DNA scans and to raise premiums if they discover a genetic tendency to reckless behavior? Would we be required to fax our DNA, rather than our CV, to potential employers? Could an employer favor a candidate because his DNA looks better? Or could we sue in such cases for “genetic discrimination?” Could a company that develops a new creature or a new organ register a patent on its DNA sequences? It is obvious that one can own a particular chicken, but can one own an entire species?

Such dilemmas are dwarfed by the ethical, social, and political implications of the Gilgamesh Project and of our potential new abilities to create superhumans. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, government medical programs throughout the world, national health insurance programs, and national constitutions worldwide recognize that a humane society ought to give all its members fair medical treatment and keep them in relatively good health. That was all well and good as long as medicine was chiefly concerned with preventing illness and healing the sick. What might happen once medicine becomes preoccupied with enhancing human abilities? Would all humans be entitled to such enhanced abilities, or would there be a new superhuman elite?

Our late modern world prides itself on recognizing, for the first time in history, the basic equality of all humans, yet it might be poised to create the most unequal of all societies. Throughout history, the upper classes always claimed to be smarter, stronger, and generally better than the underclass. They were usually deluding themselves. A baby born to a poor peasant family was likely to be as intelligent as the crown prince. With the help of new medical capabilities, the pretensions of the upper classes might soon become an objective reality.

This is not science fiction. Most science fiction plots describe a world in which Sapiens-identical to us-enjoy superior technology such as light-speed spaceships and laser guns. The ethical and political dilemmas central to these plots are taken from our own world, and they merely recreate our emotional and social tensions against a futuristic backdrop. Yet the real potential of future technologies is to change Homo sapiens itself, including our emotions and desires, and not merely our vehicles and weapons. What is a spaceship compared to an eternally-young cyborg who does not breed and has no sexuality, who can share thoughts directly with other beings, whose abilities to focus and remember are a thousand times greater than our own, and who is never angry or sad, but has emotions and desires that we cannot begin to imagine?

Science fiction rarely describes such a future, because an accurate description is by definition incomprehensible. Producing a film about the life of some super-cyborg is akin to producing Hamlet for an audience of Neanderthals. Indeed, the future masters of the world will probably be more different from us, than we are from Neanderthals. Whereas we and the Neanderthals are at least human, our inheritors will be godlike. Physicists define the Big Bang as a singularity. It is a point at which all the known laws of nature did not exist. Time too did not exist. It is thus meaningless to say that anything existed “before” the Big Bang. We may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world— me, you, men, women, love and hate—will become irrelevant. Anything happening beyond that point is meaningless to us.

The Frankenstein Prophecy

In 1818 Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, the story of a scientist who creates an artificial being that goes out of control and wreaks havoc. In the last two centuries, the same story has been told over and over again in countless versions. It has become a central pillar of our new scientific mythology. At first sight, the Frankenstein story appears to warn us that if we try to play God and engineer life we will be punished severely. Yet the story has a deeper meaning.

The Frankenstein myth confronts Homo sapiens with the fact that the last days are fast approaching. Unless some nuclear or ecological catastrophe intervenes, so goes the story, the pace of technological development will soon lead to the replacement of Homo sapiens by completely different beings who possess not only different physiques, but also very different cognitive and emotional worlds. This is something most Sapiens find extremely disconcerting. We like to believe that in the future people just like us will travel from planet to planet in fast spaceships. We don’t like to contemplate the possibility that in the future, beings with emotions and identities like ours will no longer exist, and our place will be taken by alien life forms whose abilities dwarf our own.

We somehow find comfort in the idea that Dr. Frankenstein created a terrible monster, whom we had to destroy in order to save ourselves. We like to tell the story that way because it implies that we are the best of all beings, that there never was and never will be something better than us. Any attempt to improve us will inevitably fail, because even if our bodies might be improved, you cannot touch the human spirit.

We would have a hard time swallowing the fact that scientists could engineer spirits as well as bodies, and that future Dr. Frankensteins could therefore create something truly superior to us, something that will look at us as condescendingly as we look at the Neanderthals.

***

We cannot be certain whether today’s Frankensteins will indeed fulfill this prophecy. The future is unknown, and it would be surprising if the forecasts of the last few pages were realized in full. History teaches us that what seems to be just around the corner may never materialize due to unforeseen barriers, and that other unimagined scenarios will in fact come to pass. When the nuclear age erupted in the 1940s, many forecasts were made about the future nuclear world of the year 2000. When sputnik and Apollo 11 fired the imagination of the world, everyone began predicting that by the end of the century, people would be living in space colonies on Mars and Pluto. Few of these forecasts came true. On the other hand, nobody foresaw the Internet.

So don’t go out just yet to buy liability insurance to indemnify you against lawsuits filed by digital beings. The above fantasies—or nightmares—are just stimulants for your imagination. What we should take seriously is the idea that the next stage of history will include not only technological and organizational transformations, but also fundamental transformations in human consciousness and identity. And these could be transformations so fundamental that they will call the very term “human” into question. How long do we have? No one really knows. As already mentioned, some say that by 2050 a few humans will already be a-mortal. Less radical forecasts speak of the next century, or the next millennium. Yet from the perspective of 70,000 years of Sapiens history, what are a few millennia?

If the curtain is indeed about to drop on Sapiens history, we members of one of its final generations should devote some time to answering one last question: What do we want to become? This question, sometimes known as the Human Enhancement question, dwarfs the debates that currently preoccupy politicians, philosophers, scholars, and ordinary people. After all, today’s debate between today’s religions, ideologies, nations, and classes will in all likelihood disappear along with Homo sapiens. If our successors indeed function on a different level of consciousness (or perhaps possess something beyond consciousness that we cannot even conceive), it seems doubtful that Christianity or Islam will be of interest to them, that their social organization could be communist or capitalist, or that their genders could be male or female.

And yet the great debates of history are important because at least the first generation of these gods would be shaped by the cultural ideas of their human designers. Would they be created in the image of capitalism, of Islam, or of feminism? The answer to this question might send them careening in entirely different directions.

Most people prefer not to think about it. Even the field of bioethics prefers to address another question, “What is it forbidden to do?” Is it acceptable to make genetic experiments on living human beings? On aborted fetuses? On stem cells? Is it ethical to clone sheep? And chimpanzees? And what about humans? All of these are important questions, but it is naïve to imagine that we might simply hit the brakes and stop the scientific projects that are upgrading Homo sapiens into a different kind of being. For these projects are inextricably meshed together with the quest for immortality—the Gilgamesh Project. Ask scientists why they study the genome, or try to connect a brain to a computer, or try to create a mind inside a computer. Nine out of ten times you’ll get the same standard answer: we are doing it to cure diseases and save human lives. Even though the implications of creating a mind inside a computer are far more dramatic than curing psychiatric illnesses, this is the standard justification given, because nobody can argue with it. This is why the Gilgamesh Project is the flagship of science. It serves to justify everything science does. Dr. Frankenstein piggybacks on the shoulders of Gilgamesh. Since it is impossible to stop Gilgamesh, it is also impossible to stop Dr. Frankenstein.

The only thing we can try to do is to influence the direction they are taking. Since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, perhaps the real question facing us is not ‘What do we want to become’, but “What do we want to want?” Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven’t given it enough thought.

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When ethics become outdated

Like all our other senses, our sense of justice, too, has ancient evolutionary roots. Human morality was shaped in the course of millions of years of evolution, adapted to dealing with the social and ethical dilemmas that cropped up in the lives of small hunter-gatherer bands.

Is the hunter who brought down the mammoth with his own hands entitled to a larger portion of its meat? Does the fact that I am stronger than you allow me to take all the mushrooms you gathered so laboriously? If I know that one of the women in the group is plotting to kill me, is it ok to act preemptively and cut her throat in the dark of night?

On the face of things, not much has changed since we left the savanna for the urban jungle. One might think that the questions we face today—the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, social discrimination, the destruction of the Forests—are fundamentally the same. But that is an illusion. The truth is that from the standpoint of morality, like many other standpoints, we are hardly adapted to the world in which we live.

It’s the numbers that are to blame. The foragers’ sense of justice was structured to cope with dilemmas of small numbers. Dilemmas relating to the lives of a few dozen people in an area of a few dozen square kilometers across a few decades. When we try to comprehend relations between millions of people in entire continents across whole generations, our morality is overwhelmed.

Justice is usually connected with a thorough understanding of cause-and-effect relations. If you collected mushrooms to feed your children and I now take that basket of mushrooms forcefully, meaning that all your work has been for naught and your children will go to sleep hungry, that is not just. It’s easy to grasp this, because it’s easy to see the cause-and-effect relations.

An inherent feature of the modern global world is that its causal relations are highly ramified and complex. I try to be a moral person, to be attentive to the needs of others, to avoid causing unnecessary suffering to others as well as to myself. At the same time, if I am to believe left-wing activists, I am a full partner to the wrongs inflicted by the Israeli army and settlers in the occupied territories. According to the socialists, my comfortable life is based on child labor in dismal Third World factories. Animal welfare advocates remind me that my life is interwoven with one of the most appalling crimes in history—the subjugation of billions of farm animals to a brutal regime of exploitation.

Am I really to blame for all that? It’s not easy to say. Since I depend for my existence on a mind-boggling network of economic and political ties, and since global causal connections are so tangled, I find it difficult to answer even the simplest questions , such as where my lunch comes from, who made the shoes I’m wearing, and what my pension fund is doing with my money.

Morality of intentions

A primeval hunter-gatherer knew very well where her lunch came from (she gathered it herself), who made her moccasins (he slept 20 meters from her) and what her pension fund was doing (back then, people had only one pension fund, called “children”).

Years of research might expose me to the fact that my pension fund is financing a bloody civil war in an African banana republic. But during the time it takes me to find that out, I might be missing far more important discoveries, such as the fate of chickens in battery cages.

The system is structured in such a way that those who make no effort to know can remain in blissful ignorance, and those who do make an effort will find it very difficult to discover the truth. How is it possible to uphold the precept “thou shall not steal” in a world in which the system is ceaselessly stealing for me and without my knowledge?

One can try to evade the problem by adopting a “morality of intentions.” What’s important is what I intend, not the outcome of what I do. However, in a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know. The greatest crimes in modern history were caused not by hatred and malice, but by ignorance and inattention. There is something amiss with the intentions of those who do not make a sincere effort to know.

But what counts as “a sincere effort to know”? The bitter truth is that the world has simply become too complicated for our hunter-gatherer brains. Even if we truly want to, most of us are no longer capable of understanding the major moral problems of the world. People are capable of comprehending relations between two gatherers, or between 20 gatherers, but not between several million Israelis and several million Palestinians, or between hundreds of millions of Europeans and hundreds of millions of Africans.

Downsize the issue

In trying to comprehend and judge moral dilemmas of this scale, almost everybody resorts to one of three methods. The first is to downsize the issue: to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as though it were occurring between two gatherers; to imagine the Palestinians as a lone person and Israel as a lone person, one good and one bad. The historical complexity of the conflict is replaced by a simple, clear plot.

The second is to focus on a touching human story, which ostensibly stands for the whole conflict. When you try to explain to people the true complexity of the conflict by means of statistics and precise data, you lose them; but a personal story about the fate of one child activates the tear ducts, makes the blood boil and generates false moral certainty.

The third method is by means of conspiracy theories. How does the global economy function, and is it good or bad? That is too complicated to grasp. It is far easier to imagine that 20 multibillionaires are pulling the strings behind the scenes, controlling the media and fomenting wars in order to enrich themselves. This is almost always a baseless fantasy. The contemporary world is too complicated, not only for our sense of justice but also for our managerial abilities. No one—including the multibillionaires, the CIA, the Catholic Church and the Freemasons—really understands what is going on in the world. So no one is capable of pulling the strings effectively. What then should we do? I don’t know.